"Michael Ashcroft’s parting shots has been to conduct private polling in some of the constituencies occupied by Lib Dem cabinet ministers. The results? Chris Huhne totally wiped out, it is said, and Clegg within a hundred votes of losing his seat."

The nastiest polling for the LibDems right now has them hovering around half of what they polled in the General Election. Given that, the Eastleigh figures aren't so strange for a poll that obviously works on worst-assumptions; it's also worth pointing out that a sizeable residual Labour vote that had previously avoided tactical voting more than halved in May (down from around 20% to 9%). But the Hallam figures look like trolling; even though boundary changes mean that it isn't quite the Labour dead-zone it was before and even though Cleggmania and the post-97 tactical vote are no more, such a high Labour vote in a constituency that includes Dore & Totley ward is very unlikely under any circumstances.

Constituency polls in this country are, of course, known for their outstanding accuracy.

LOL. This is just too good to be true. I hope it's true.

As someone who lives there, I think the Hallam one is quite plausible, actually. There's a lot of annoyance at Clegg, and Labour made the right choice of leader to take advantage. (That isn't saying that they made the right choice of leader for other places.) Indeed, the fieldwork for this was done before the Browne report (although probably after the recommendations started being leaked) and if the poll was accurate, I suspect Labour are now ahead in Hallam. The council elections next year could provide some indication of what's going on; presumably there will be some attempts by the local Lib Dems to distance themselves from the Government.

As far as I'm aware, there really haven't been enough constituency polls in recent UK general elections to judge their accuracy record. Is there a list anywhere of results?

To add a note of caution, shouldn't this be treated with some of the scepticism due a Tory internal poll, given the source?

There was also a poll conducted and released in April this year in Norwich South, which showed Charles Clarke with a big lead, and the Lib Dems tied with the Greens for third place....

I'd forgotten that one: certainly not a triumph.

There is a document on the British Polling Council websitehttp://www.britishpollingcouncil.org/simon-atkinson.pdfwhich gives various polling statistics from 2005 and includes 5 constituency polls, three by ICM and two by NOP. To sum up, the ICM polls (in Finchley & Golders Green, Shipley and Haltemprice & Howden) were pretty accurate (they got the Shipley winner wrong, but it was close enough that it can't be considered a bad poll) while NOP were accurate in Cardiff North but badly overestimated the Tories and underestimated an Independent (and Labour, to a lesser extent) in Ynys Môn.

Time for LibDems to dump Clegg. He's certainly underperformed in my estimation. Labour on the other hand is looking good.

My guess is that Conference 2011 will make or break him, assuming the AV Referendum fails of course. I think that Simon Hughes (or Tim Farron?) will step up to take over as a left-wing alternative to Clegg. They'd just have to sit and hope that their Labour tactical voters would forgive them.

Either way, the LibDems need a back-up plan should the Government lose the confidence of the House. 14 days to negotiate or they'll be a snap election, and all that. I'm sure they wouldn't want to fight an election, polling below 10%...

Fresh elections are not in the interests of the LibDems (and probably won't be for years). Removing Clegg = fresh elections suddenly much more likely. Which means that Clegg is safe enough. There was far less trouble at their conference than many were suspecting/hoping for. We're more likely to see a split than to see the left of the party take over for real; besides they aren't in a great position as they mostly acquiesced to the coalition and the ones that didn't just stayed quiet.

I was wondering how Clegg was doing with 18-24s after this week's tuition fees stuff. Last week he was 36/38 amoung 18-24s, now he's 32/47... -4/+9. Gonna be even tougher getting the Liberal students to polling stations, when the time comes. I actually think a majority Tory government would be more popular than the Coalition at this point.